Top tips for building science communities with social media

So a few months ago, I was fortunate enough to be asked to give a talk at the Nature Careers Expo in London about how to use social media to build scientific communities. As part of this, there was a short panel discussion afterwards with myself and Sarah Blackford from the Society for Experimental Biology, and Nature have made a few short videos of some of the responses available!

The first question is on how to get more attention for your blogging activities. Some of my top tips are:

The second of these was on how to avoid getting your work ‘scooped’ by sharing it on social media. In short, if your work can be scooped based on a tweet, your work is probably pretty crap. Nonetheless, it pays to be prudent with what you share – social media isn’t the right venue for everything, so think carefully about what you want your audience(s) to know.

The third part of this was an unusual, but I sense increasingly common aspect of social media use. I’ve been extremely fortunate in that by using social media and sharing my work in advance of ‘formal publication’, other researchers have requested that I work with them on similar research projects, ultimately leading to the publication of two papers (so far). Although anecdotal, it does highlight the enormous benefit of openly sharing your work in advance, especially as a junior researcher.